The Rebirth Of `Apollo` Miami City Ballet Is Restoring What Choreographer George Balanchine Had Cut Since The 1928 Production Of Apollo.

January 10, 1988|By KRISTY MONTEE, Dance Writer

The year was 1979. The occasion was the much-anticipated debut of Mikhail Baryshnikov in George Balanchine`s greatest work, Apollo. But what the audience at the State Theatre in New York saw that night left many of them thinking that the gods surely must be crazy.

The Russian superstar`s performance was fine enough. But what had Balanchine done to the ballet itself?

Where was the prologue in which Leto gives birth to the young god? Gone! What happened to Apollo`s first variation? Missing! And where was the poignant epilogue in which the god makes his ascension to Parnassus? Vanished! Even Igor Stravinsky`s lovely score had not escaped the knife.

The weeping and wailing went on long after the premiere. Why did Balanchine have to tamper with his magnificent masterwork, the one he himself called the turning point in his creative life?

``I took out all the garbage,`` Balanchine retorted. ``That`s why.``

This revised Apollo became the final and officially authorized version. This is how it is now performed -- sanctified, really -- by New York City Ballet, which has taken to freeze-framing the choreographer`s works just as they were when he died in 1983.

But it is not how Edward Villella remembers Apollo. When Miami City Ballet premieres its Apollo this week at Gusman Cultural Center, it will be performing the original longer version.

Why? ``I just had an artistic compulsion to do the whole thing,`` Villella explains.

Part of that compulsion might be to find an answer to the question that troubles many Balanchine partisans: In what form should the Balanchine ballets be preserved to ensure authenticity? As they were when he died? As they were when he originally did them? Or as they have come to be, filtered through the memories of his diaspora of ex-dancers now leading companies across the world.

To Villella, the longer Apollo is the one he danced with New York City Ballet in the `60s and `70s, and he feels the version is still viable.

``I never knew why Balanchine decided to change it,`` Villella says. ``But he constantly tinkered with his works, often changing things with good reason just for the convenience of the moment. My question with Apollo is, did he do this just for the moment or was it for truly aesthetic reasons?``

-- Only Balanchine, of course, knew. He did explain at one point that he had been pruning away the ballet`s non-essential parts for decades, trying to find its essence. As always, that essence was pure dance.

In fact, this tenet, so central to all of Balanchine`s works, began with the ballet Apollo. Creating the ballet had such a profound effect on Balanchine that he was moved to call it the ``turning point in my life.``

In 1928, the precocious young Balanchine was working for Ballet Russe impresario Serge Diaghilev, whose genius as an arts patron was matched only by his glee in astonishing audiences. In 1926, Balanchine choreographed an entr`acte for Romeo and Juliet with no music and a half-lowered curtain that allowed only dancers` legs to show.

Diaghilev got Stravinsky`s published score, which had been commissioned for another company in America, and turned it over to his new ballet master, Balanchine, who had recently emigrated from Leningrad.

Balanchine was inspired by the melodious score, in which he saw a reillumination of ballet`s most articulate composers -- Delibes, Glinka and Tchaikovsky, among others. He said the music left him with an impression of ``a white-on-white canvas.``

As Stravinsky had done with the music, Balanchine did with the movement, distilling three centuries of ballet`s formal inheritance into a vital, completely new type of classicism that pointed the way to an unlimited future.

Typical of a Diaghilev production, Apollon Musagete, as it was then called, was trussed in elaborate decor. Diaghilev wanted a look that bespoke reborn classicism without aping common interpretations of Greece. Painter Andre Bauchant was hired to create a naive Rousseau-like backdrop. Coco Chanel designed the costumes, a knee-length skirt halfway between the Romantic tutu and modern sportswear. As Apollo, dancer Serge Lifar was dressed in a red pleated tunic and gold wig.

The ballet began with a prologue in which Apollo is born, tended by nymphs who bring him his divine lute. Slowly, he progresses from infantile experimentation to mature expression.

In the second part at Parnassus, the fully grown god meets the three muses: Calliope (poetry, rhythm), Polyhymnia (mimicry) and Terpsichore (dance).

Each muse shows off her special talent, and Apollo dances a grand variation, finally choosing Terpsichore. Their duet leads to an exquisite pas de deux.